Economy

Now What?

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In the lobby of STRIVE, an employment-training program in East Harlem, the messages are clear, stated in a bold, black font on posters that greet the overwhelmingly black and Latino clients as they get off the elevator and enter the lobby: “Please Remove Your Hats.” “Please Do Not Wear Pants Below the Waist.” “Please Do Not Wear Headphones.”Inside the classroom, says STRIVE’s chief operating officer, Angelo Rivera, attitudes are a primary target. “You have to inflict some kind of discomfort and pain so they can own up to what their issues are,” he says. “That whole attitudinal piece will make you or break you in the world of work.”But in a month of instruction, STRIVE students also get two days on civics.

Economy

Like A Canyon

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Just north of 125th Street, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture displays a timeline of black political activism. The familiar faces— Garvey, DuBois, King, Malcolm X, Jackson— are all there. So is a picture of a group of black protesters, men and women, in long coats, fedoras and pillbox hats picketing against discriminatory hiring practices by defense contractors … in 1943. One man is holding a sign that reads, “The Negro People Must Have Jobs.”The popular history of the black civil rights movement usually focuses on its quest for legal rights like the ability to attend previously all-white schools, sit at the front of the bus or eat at Jim Crow lunch counters. But bread-and-butter issues were always at the movement’s core, because black-white disparities in the job market have been present almost since what Hilary Shelton, director for the NAACP’s Washington bureau, calls “that very peculiar employment program, the African slave trade.”It wasn’t until the middle part of last century, however, that those disparities began showing up in the unemployment rate.